SC09The SC09 supercomputing trade show finished up late last week, but El Reg still has a bunch of things to tell you about. One of them is a preview of the Opteron blade server for the upcoming high-end XT6 and midrange XT6m supercomputers from Cray.

You now have the option of pepping up your sorry notebook by using an Imation solid state drive (SSD) upgrade kit, but only if you are happy getting inside its casing and swapping out its hard drive for the SSD.

ReviewWith smooth, curved edges and an eye-pleasing design, the 15.6in X520 slips into Samsung’s new X-series range. There are two other X-series models: the 11.6in X120 and 14in X420. The focus is on mobility here and, as such, all feature so-called CULV - Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage - processors and integrated graphics from Intel.

Long Island police last week cuffed Island Def Jam Records vice prez James Roppo for failing to disperse a crowd of hysterical teenagers with the social networking equivalent of the water cannon - a tweet.

Pentagon boffinry chiefs have decided to spend more than a hundred million dollars on a new military database/map system which will let troops in the field collect, share and organise intelligence more effectively.

You the expertThe capabilities of modern servers offer in-principle benefits of more dynamic management, workload balancing and so on. How do these capabilities impact on the skillsets required of data centre operations staff today?

Forging ahead much faster than had been expected, particle-smashing boffins at the Large Hadron Collider have now carried out actual collisions - blasting beams of protons into one another at a healthy 450 giga-electron-volts each for total whack of 900 GeV.

A UK-based manufacturer of Xbox 360 memory cards has begun legal action against Microsoft over the software giant's efforts to prevent so-called “unauthorised” memory cards being used with the console.

Mini PollFollowing our discussions this week on the importance of evaluating application packages from a technology perspective, we're interested in gathering some more information from you on the things that really matter.

Our piece last week on keepgoing.biz, which deployed an arsenal of weaponry to shoot the shit out of an innocent server, prompted HardOCP.com's Kyle Bennett to drop us a line suggesting he was better endowed in the firepower department.

LabThe adoption of server virtualization technology follows several trajectories. We could consider the breadth of its penetration in terms of the number of organisations using it today, or we could consider the depth of its use in individual organisations, in terms of what they actually do with it.

ExclusiveThe first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

Keen to leap into the SuperSpeed era? There may not be many USB 3.0 devices you can use, but at least you can now prep your notebook for the new bus standard. Accessory supplier Brando has begun selling an ExpressCard 34 add-in with a pair of SuperSpeed ports built in.

The put-upon people of Manchester got the chance to quiz Home Office minister Meg Hillier on ID cards yesterday, while Parliament got an update on the national identity register - the database at the heart of the project.

eBay is offering customers hit by the failure of its search engine last weekend the chance to relist items, rather than sell them at lower prices. They are also offering discount vouchers to buyers who are disappointed to have lost out.

WorkshopFew words in the IT industry’s vocabulary are more grandiose than ‘orchestration’, evoking images of symphonic movements, rows of groomed musicians and wild-haired, baton-pointing conductors. Just how the term came to be used for the allocation of server resources must leave IT managers more than a little flummoxed, however.

Customers of Fasthosts - the UK-based webhost - have been without both POP and web-based email for much of the day, complaining that such outages have become, shall we say, far too prevalent in recent months.